12/08/2011

Notes on the December 7, 2011 Meeting

Last night we had another warm gathering and a rewarding discussion. What follows is my recollection of some of the things we talked about.

As always, please feel free to correct any misinterpretations, distortions or omissions in the comments section at the end!

Okay, here goes:

1. Yann’s “Moment of Being” in the Bath

Yann opened the evening with his presentation. As always with Yann (he’s an old friend, so I can say this), it was very strange, deeply felt, and somehow just what we needed.

“I am floating in the bath… naked,” he intoned in his deep voice, silencing the room.

“The water is warm. I feel free and light. I float. Then… I pull the plug.”

With this last phrase he made a sudden gesture with his thumb and index finger, roughly halfway between his waist and his knees, which had me worried, for a moment, about where exactly he was going with this. But I soon realized that he was merely showing us how he "pulled the plug". Perhaps the picture I had in my mind was too vivid? Perhaps I have been skinny dipping with Yann a few too many times?

Anyway, he continued: “The water disappears down the drain. Counter-clockwise... clockwise... whichever way it goes…” (Incidentally, Miriam was right on this – apparently the Coriolis Effect does determine the rotation and direction of weather patterns in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, but has little bearing on something as minute as the flow of water down a drain. So the whole the-water-flows-in-a-different-direction-down-toilets-in-Australia idea is a total crock. Go Miriam!).

But I keep getting distracted. Back to Yann.

“I feel myself growing heavier,” he said.

“The effect of gravity takes hold of me. The water is all gone now. My body presses down on the bathtub. I notice my body's weight. More than that, I feel its weight. So I lay there for an extra 20 more minutes, my body wet and glistening in the candlelight, even after the water had all drained away.”

Okay, I added the "wet and glistening in the candlelight" part, just to see if you were paying attention. But that was basically it.

Other than managing to inject a healthy amount of erotic tension into a room full of half-strangers, Yann's intention, which he then helpfully spelled out for us, was to illustrate how reading Proust has changed him. He would never have paid such close attention to the details of his bath if it were not for reading Proust. Proust was to blame for his wife thinking he was losing it when she came in to brush her teeth.

Miriam chimed in and said that she agreed: that at the core of this novel is a description of phenomenological experience, that is, those subjective experiences that we have by way of our senses (though, as Proust would surely emphasize, what we do with these sensory experiences is something else altogether). The physical facts of the world matter.

Heather linked Proust’s approach of paying close attention to details to the practice of “mindfulness”. I brought up the heavily romanticized accounts we read in the literature about the various Native American tribes, and their customs of paying close attention to detail and present-orientation (say in animal tracking). In this context I recalled a lecture I heard once on the subject of what we can learn from the Indians about becoming a true “native”. The speaker suggested that if you are without an awareness of the plants and water sources and wildlife around your home, you can hardly call yourself a “native” at all. Certainly, on this accounting, the Narrator in In Search of Lost Time is unquestionably a native of Combray, given his detailed knowledge of the paths from his Aunt Léonie's house alone. Yann mentioned that, partly inspired by Proust, he has recently formed a group to explore the geology and local history of the Bay Area, his adopted home.

Another theme that came up based on Yann's presentation was that although we are all bound by the laws of physics (gravity, the Coriolis Effect (go Miriam!), the loss of heat to skin while sitting in a bathtub without water, etc.), each of us has experiences which nevertheless feel intensely personal all the same. Thnking of this, I referenced a passage from "Swann in Love" in which Swann, having recently fallen for Odette, suddenly experiences a pang of fear for what is to come:

"... noticing as he drove home that the moon had now changed its position relatively to his own and was almost touching the horizon, feeling that his love, too, was obedient to those immutable natural laws, he asked himself whether this period upon which he had entered would last much longer, whether presently his mind's eye would cease to behold that beloved face save as occupying a distant and diminished position, and on the verge of ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its charm" (SW, 338).

Love is obedient to these immutable laws, and yet experienced moment by moment as a living, breathing thing. We are ourselves phenomena, and yet we experience phenomena, as Yann did in the bath. This is a strange paradox, which lies at the heart of Proust's concerns.

2. Is Heightened Sensual Awareness of This Sort Only Possible During Childhood?

I asked the group at this point, however, whether there isn’t another element to Proust’s rapturous descriptions of the young Narrator's sensual awareness: namely, that it belongs only to a certain period in life, childhood.

The Méséglise and Guermantes Ways, for all of their pleasures, seem to lead only one way for Proust: out of Eden. We gather that, somehow as he grew older the Narrator found himself banished from paradise, in some respects at least. Renée brought our attention here to the way Proust insists that only those experiences he had as a child remain vivid to him as a grown man:

“It is because I believed in things and people while I walked along those paths that the things and the people they made known to me are the only ones that I still take seriously and that bring me joy. Whether it is because the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers” (SW, 260).

Jennifer spoke up to say that of course there is something lost, but there is something gained too. We lose some of the limitless ecstasy of a child, but we gain more understanding, and certainly more stability. She pointed out that, in our later years, we may not have the same excitement about receiving a goodnight kiss from our mother, but neither do you have the terrible anguish and fear for its refusal. Sylvaine pointed out that a child sees clearly, but only with a kind of narrow tunnel vision (I might add, have you ever seen a child hunting for plainly hidden Easter eggs? If you have then you know it's hilarious. They see every blade of grass but not the egg two feet away!). As adults, we get more of the broader context.

Tom remarked that this is characteristic of Proust: every experience he describes is “layered”, encountered at different phases of life, enriched by memory and by flights of the imagination, altered by time and exposure to other experiences. As we read, he added, we experience the “liminal” spaces between these layers.

So, for example, we get first a straightforward childhood encounter with Gilberte – a freckled, reddish-haired girl passes the Narrator one day on a path near Swann’s estate. But then we also get its recreation in the Narrator’s memory: her enigmatic smile as she passed, her black eyes reimagined as azure (SW, 198). And then we get the Narrator’s parents' disinterest in this girl too; later we shall meet her again, in Paris, in a park on the Champs d'Elysees. Of all of these iterations, none has primacy; they are reflections of an unreachable, unified truth that is never to be grasped and may not even exist.

With that, Tom and Chandra and their baby exited, citing cat dander and the lateness of the hour, leaving us to mull over his great observation unaided by further explanation until January. We missed you T & C! (Seriously, we did keep referring back to your comment about layers all night.)

3. Making It Personal: Proustian Memories, Lightening Round

I asked at this point if there was anybody in the group who had taken a moment to think back on his or her childhood and recall the sensual experiences of that time, and if he or she wanted to share it with the rest of us. I mentioned for myself the distinct smell of the redwood hot tub, built by my father (as I believe was mandated for every backyard in Berkeley in the 70s), and how that aroma, mixed with the chlorine, conjured so much for me: my friendship with my sister, the blinking lights of planes passing overhead in the night sky, the feeling of grabbing a towel and heading into the living room from the cold air, that day a friend and I sprayed a hose, from our position in the hot tub, at our attractive house-sitter (my parents were away) as she sunbathed topless and facedown in the hopes that she would suddenly spring up... I could go on but I'll refrain. Dirk mentioned his grandmother's basement, and the smells of antiquated furniture, dried tomatoes, jams and jellies. Interestingly, he pointed out that he had only explored this basement when he was alone, with nothing else to do. (Thank god there were no iPhones and Wiis back then.) Jennifer mentioned the rank, sweet-smelling smell of pollution in Rome, and how it feels her with joy to this day whenever she happens to catch a whiff of it. Todd talked about his dog's soft and velvety paws.

This part of the evening, which involved personal recollections, brought out an interesting conversation at the end of the night. Some French members of our group insisted to me and Renée separately that in France a reading group is not likely to get so personal, ever. Rather there would be a kind of academic formality to the discussions. The American expectation, of course, is that we will always find a way to make it personal. Lea, who is half French and half Finnish, said that she appreciates this cultural difference, and she likes the willingness to reveal emotions and our own quirky responses. Marie-José suggested that French people are simply taught how to conduct textual analysis better (I tried not to get too huffy and bit my lip, even though I was still embarrassed about how painful it had appeared to be for her, a few minutes earlier, when she corrected my pronunciation of "Guermantes"). Florence wondered why, even if she was so inclined, we would ever want to hear anything personal: what would be the point? The Americans in the conversation all insisted that we consider it crucial, in a setting such as this, to make it personal; how else will we figure out what this novel is about if not based on what it does to us? I guess we are pragmatic about such things -- but here we get into cultural cross-currents again, beyond the scope of this summary.

4. Is Pure Sensuality Not Enough?

The next line of discussion that I recall is whether Proust, or at least his Narrator, is criticizing, either implicitly or explicitly, the purely sensual life, the life of the aesthete, if you will, in the Combray chapter.

It is in the section on the Guermantes Way that Proust's Narrator first introduces the theme of his own ambition to be a writer. For he discovers, while out searching for Gilberte one day, that the ecstasy of direct experience is short-lived:

"... all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not achieved the repose of enlightment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift towards an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation..." (SW, 218)

He writes that on one occasion, seeing the "dappled pink reflection" that the tiled roof of a gardener's shed cast upon the pond, he cried aloud, brandishing his furled umbrella: "Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!"

"But at the same time," he adds,

"I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavor to see more clearly into the sources of my rapture" (SW, 219).

He determines that to "see more clearly" into the sources of his rapture he must write. At first he hopes his father can make him "the foremost writer of the day" simply by ordering it to be so (SW, 244). But he finds that the more he dreams, the more he begins to doubt himself. And finally, he despairs:

"It seemed to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude in writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renouced literature for ever... This intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the nullity of my intellect, prevailed against all the flattering words that might be lavished upon me..." (SW, 244)

I got all worked up at this point, saying that I resented this judgment that Proust -- broad-minded, big-hearted Proust! -- seemed to be showing against any or all people who may choose more modest, more "intimate, spontaneous" lives than that to which he aspired. Marie-José reminded us that it is not Proust, it is only his fictional creation. To which I agreed, of course, but that doesn't blunt the attack. My interest was with the view, expressed by the Narrator, that we cannot be saved by the ecstatic awareness that Yann and Heather and all of us were praising at the beginning of the evening. We would feel worthless even if we achieved such a state of satori. We are all too full of judgments and prejudices and status claims.

I posed a thought experiment for the group: Imagine, I said, that you are traveling in Bali, and you meet a gentle, conscientious, charming French man who carries himself with astonishing equanimity. He is full of love. A great listener. He does not have an overly bronzed, hairless chest, suggesting something creepy. He is easy on the eye but unremarkable. He is not trying to seduce you, either; his girlfriend visits him from France every few months, and he is faithful.

The catch? You learn that for 10 years he has done nothing but travel and observe the incidents of daily life -- oh... and engage with people, like you, whom he meets along the way. He does not write down his experiences. He does not take photographs. He doesn't even organize spontaneous yoga classes on the beach at dawn. Is is life less worthy, according to you? According to Proust? I am sensing that it is suspicious, to all of us. This involves a form of judgment, and I'm not sure where it is heading to as we move through In Search of Lost Time. We just got a glimpse of it towards the end of the Combray chapter.

Heather spoke up to say that this guy in Bali would clearly need to get a life and do something. Again, of course -- everything in our culture condemns the man's sunny Balinese drift. But why exactly do we condemn him? That's my question. Is it because he is morally failing? Or is it that we pity him? Or is it that we sense -- perhaps this is Proust's point after all -- that his experiences of pleasure, for all of their beauty and directness and even mindfulness, lack something different that we also value. What is this other thing? A different pleasure, gained by hard work, by practice? Is it art? Is it making some kind of a contribution to others -- or as the cliché goes, largely empty of content and hence irritating to my ear, is it devoting yourself to "something larger than yourself"? Can we name it?

5. Listening to the "Little Phrase" from Vinteuil's Sonata for Piano and Violin

Tom, how can we keep up with you? How do you remember everything that was said? Bravo! Thank you so much for the full re-cap.

I came on line to see about the gosh gosh gosh too. I couldn't find it at first because the translation has apparently re-arranged whole chunks of these passages.

I'd still claim there isn't really moralizing judgement about writers and privileging the slow over immediate. What I understand is that initial, spontaneous responses are neither true nor profound in the ways that slow, measured examination and hard-won understanding are. Zut, zut, zut, zut.

(And, true to form, I am delighted to be right about the drain issue!)

Of course you were right on the drain issue. I should have known to defer to you immediately, on any matter of dispute. I've got another one for you... Why is it that the Winter Solstice is the longest night of the year, and then the days get longer after that, and yet winter still goes on, and even gets more dreary, until March? Wondering that this morning.